Anglican Difficulties

In November 1992 the Church of England made its final decision about ordaining women. In March 1994 the first' such ordinations took place in the Bristol cathedral. Between those two dates several bishops and hundreds of priests of that Church asked to be admitted to the Catholic Church. They are those Anglo-Catholics for whom that decision became the last straw. But was it really logical for Anglo-Catholics to wait for that fateful decision? Were Newman alive today, he would point at these much ignored Lectures of his delivered in 1850. There he argued, in the wake of a similarly fateful decision, that Anglo¬Catholics, who took seriously their Catholic aspirations, had no choice but to join Rome. The Lectures are both a penetrat¬ing portrayal of what Newman called "the mimic Catholi¬cism" of the Church of England and a most authentic analysis of what the Oxford Movement was truly about. In the light of recent events, Anglican Difficulties may emerge as the prophetic book penned by Newman. The pro¬phecy is about a "most painful logic at work in ecumenism."